UK Release Date: 19-10-2009
Price: £15.99
UK Certificate: 18
Director: Glenn McQuaid
Country: US
Distributor: Anchor Bay Entertainment

Another horror comedy; another festival success (winner of Best Independent Feature Award at the Toronto After Dark Film Festi­val); another film that makes extensive use of comic-book tropes – although in this case for no discernible reason whatsoever; and, surprise, another stinker.

I Sell the Dead is the story of a pair of happy-go-lucky graverobbers, Arthur Blake and Willie Grimes (Dominic Monaghan and Larry Fessenden), told in flashback as the condemned Arthur relates his life story to an apparently sympathetic priest (Ron Perlman) with an interest in the supernatural.

The setting seems to be Ireland, the time the early 19th century, although the whole thing is so shot through with historical anachronism, romanticised Oirishry and would-be Tim Burton-esque fantasy that it’s hard to tell. The struct­ure is what one might charitably describe as picaresque; Arthur’s tale is really a series of discrete adventures and stories within stories held together by the condemned cell framework. Another way of looking at it would be to say that this is simply a mess, its origins as a 15-minute short all too evid­ent in the way it piles one incid­ent atop another in the hope of making a narrative out of them.

Visually, the film impresses, with some inventive make-up effects and nicely gothic compos­itions, although one starts to tire of its knowingly artificial world of midnight graveyards and swirling sea mists.

Not content with the horrors of the resurrection trade, we get vampires, zombies and even a Gray alien turning up, only to be snatched from the snatchers by an unseen saucer. Yes, director Glenn McQuaid chucks the kitchen sink at this, his hopes of instant cultdom bolstered by casting the likes of Perlman and Angus Scrimm (of Phantasm fame), but the film – with its stock characters and awful jokes – never rises above the level of a bad graphic novel.